The 10,000 hour rule is a ballpark figure to get to the point where you can be considered an expert and (often) make significant contributions to the field. The curse article is about being "merely competent", which takes much, much less time. As that article points out, I can probably learn to drive a car in 30 hours, but I will need a whole lot more than that to race competitively against professional drivers.

Similarly, I can learn computer programming (or cartography or carpentry) in 24 hours (or 7 days or 30 days or whatever the self-help book says), but I shouldn't expect to be able to generate useful and usable and sellable products at the end of that time. The best that I can hope for is to meet my immediate need. And for a lot of people, that's plenty good enough. I think that most of us here will agree that the more deliberate practice you make on a skill, the better you get; eventually you reach a point where you can turn out amazing products with little conscious effort. It's the practice, that gets you there, ingraining the important parts of the skill set into the non-conscious levels of your brain so that the higher levels are free to engage in the more interesting parts of the skill.